!!!

i'm going to freaking explode if i look at this for a second longer. it just might be the cutest puppy i have ever seen. it is wearing a tuxedo shirt with 2 socks. seriously. stop. i'm going to die.

predicament: emoticon punctuation

when using an emoticon at the end of a sentence, do you still use proper punctuation before preceding on to the next sentence? do you just assume that you cannot use an emoticon in the middle of a sentence in between clauses?

e.g.:

• i'm so fat :). do you like churros :p?
• my cat hates me :/, but my hamster hates me even more :(.
• lean pockets make the world the move faster =o)!

and in the case of an ellipses, it could get really confusing. i mean, are you crying or what??

e.g.:

• carson daly sucks =(...ryan seacrest might be worse.

do not tell me that asian emoticons are the solution to the problem because they are vertical. as far as i'm concerned, ^_^ can go screw themselves.

also, i would've used the word conundrum instead of predicament in the title because i think it's more appropriate, but that would be so "garden state-y" of me!

i still ♥ the 90s

don't get me wrong, i understand that the 90s was a complete debacle for retail fashion. baggy jeans, attitude tees, sketchers, and the worst: mini-backpacks. but besides that, it was gold for tv shows. as em posted on my facebook,

Emily McCoy wrote
at 8:05 pm on November 10, 2007

it is saturday night. i am watching legends of the hidden temple reruns. these kids are so stupid. SMASH THOSE CLAY POTS, damnit. Also, that monkey is not hard to assemble. Give me a break...

If you and I had only been friends in the early 90s, we would've been on that show and won a sweet game boy or a huffy bike. If only...

naturally, for christmas, she got me this awesome blue barracudas shirt with this insignia:

now, if you're smart, you should know that the blue barracudas was the coolest team. the green monkeys were alright, but as long as you weren't the purple parrots, you still had an okay chance of winning.

p.s. alex mack was sooo hot!

UPDATE: i just found out that i have 2 copies of wayside school is falling down, which is #2 of the sideways stories from wayside school series. hardcore!

hello again

i stopped writing new entries once school ended because the reason i even did it in the first place was procrastination. anyway, now that i'm unemployed, i have lots of free time and i am already sick of online scrabble and alluc.org. not that any of you care, but here is a quick update of what happened during the hiatus:

• june: moved to la
• july: started work at american apparel offices
• aug: went tanning
• sept: turned 22
• oct: bought some cute shoes
• nov:
• dec: jamie lynn spears sperminated
• jan: quit job

next month, i will still be wondering who the hell the jonas brothers are and why we care about them.

ranking cities i'm familiar with according to things that are important to me

hottest people:
1) LA
2) NYC
3) boston

best dressed:
1) NYC
2) LA
3) boston

smartest people:
1) NYC
2) boston
3) LA

nicest people:
1) LA
2) NYC
3) boston

fastest (walking) people:
1) NYC
2) boston
3) LA

best service:
1) LA
2) NYC
3) boston

most insomniac:
1) NYC
2) LA
3) boston

best pizza:
1) boston
2) NYC
3) LA doesnt have pizza

best weather:
1) LA
2) NYC
3) boston

question

how often do they collect the quarters from parking meters? because i have never seen this happen...

surprise visit!

just right now, the ice cream man came to visit me! technically, ice cream woman. this is incredibly exciting. i don't think the ice cream man has been here in eons. really, i mean it, i think the last time i heard them was in 1992. the truck made two rounds around my house before anyone stopped them, which was me. i frantically ran out and asked for a spongebob squarepants ice cream-sicle kind of thing. they were sold out, so i got a bugs bunny one instead. my mother got a sno-cone. those are pretty good, too. the children in this neighborhood have no idea what an ice cream man is. now, THAT is a deprived childhood.

dont worry, i took pictures to document this marvelous event. post them soon, i lost my camera cable.

conversation about tea parties and puberty

irene: apparently, emily had to go this mother-daughter tea thing in 5th grade at her school where they watched a video about thier changing bodies and passed out tampons and stuff. is that a mass. thing?
taylor: uh, no. definitely have that in irvine. all my sisters went.
irene: i don't think i ever went...
taylor: how'd you miss the mother-daughter tea boat?
irene: it was on a boat?! wow! i definitely did NOT go.

dirty clothes

last night, someone pooped in the cabot laundry room. as in, left a pile of fresh crap on someone's clothes. of course, no one wanted to believe this and a bunch of people (who didn't see it) speculated that a squirrel must have snuck into the laundry room and pooped. i didn't see it for myself either, but according to these testimonials over the open-list, i'm pretty sure its human poop.

• " go check it out, it's still fresh and liquid"
• "For further explanation, the turd is roughly the size of a small squirrel."
• " a SQUIRREL??? that whole f*&%ing thing is the size of a squirrel!!"
• "Given the dispersion and probably trajectory of the stuff, I think it had to be a larger animal. Small animals just don't have that much spray factor."
• "there was a LOT of this poop"
• "very liquidy"

too good/bad to be true.

"The Blender shoot was really fun because it was super rock and roll — we had a bottle of [whiskey] and ate cupcakes."
- Avril Lavigne

(congrats to adrian for finding this.)

my puppy-to-be

its currently 5am on tues and for the past 4 hours i've been googling everything about puggles (beagle/pug hybrid): pictures, breeders, training, coat types, costs, whatever else. for the longest time, i thought i was going to get a shiba inu puppy, but now i think i changed my mind. i WILL get a puggle and he will be black with a white belly. yes! just like oscar eliot!

i have 2 finals and a 20 page paper (3 pages into it) due all within the next 36 hours or something, but you know how its impossible to start on anything until there's an hour left and then you have no choice? yeah, until then, i'll be looking at pictures of puggle puppies.

bad words

remember my good cereals list? i think its time for another list. today's is words i don't like saying, hearing, and/or sometimes reading.

• lozenge
• loin
• groin
• handsome (makes no sense)
• mushroom (same)
• buttocks
• brassiere
• trough
• broil
• awry (as a kid, i read this as awe-ree)
• follicle
• pustule
• thong
• moustache
• shampoo
• banal
• corps (always read this wrong in my head)
• vermicelli
• venereal
• woman
• yeast
• saucer
• girdle
• girth
• birth
• cloister
• ham
• uvula
• penal
• jaundice
• pregnant
• condiment
• fungus
• corny
• horny

trough and lozenge tie for the worst word ever award.

buy stuff here

i am spending way too much time (and maybe money) on these sites, but theyre seriously worth it. i will never buy anything at msrp again!

www.pricegrabber.com
www.pricewatch.com

yay for new camera memory card and 500gb external hard drive. amazing!

south korea to be renamed "terran confederacy"

do you know who she is? (hint: she is not me 4 years from now.) i don't know what her name is, but on pcgamess.com, it says she's one of the best professional starcraft players in korea, which probably means she's one the best in the entire universe. now i just need to find a country where they live and breathe 'alchemy' on yahoo games. and since we all know that i'm the alchemy champion (board cleared in 1:19, impressive i know), i would easily become an obsession there!

on saturday, blizzard entertainment officially announced the current development of starcraft 2 at thier worldwide invitational held in seoul (obviously). according to the AP, an estimated 35% of south korea's population is considered "gamers," many of them very familiar with starcraft and several of them now dead from game-addiction/overplaying (i'm totally serious). here is a brief timeline of what to expect from now:

• may 2007: blizzard announces starcraft 2 in seoul. south korea implodes with joy. blizzard does not announce specific release date.
• june 2007: korean government funds project to create time machine to teleport koreans into future, find out release date, and possibly procure a copy of starcraft 2.
• later 2007: mission fails. several koreans killed in the attempt. handful of anxiety/depression suicides also occur from failure to wait until next year. national holiday instituted to commemorate dead.
• sometime 2008: blizzard finally announces release date and price. koreans implode with more joy. release date is instituted as national holiday called "starcraft 2 release date."
• shortly after in 2008: starcraft 2 released. koreans implode even with more joy. seoul hosts starcraft parade on this glorious holiday.
• later 2008: consequential deaths follow from game-addiction. tragic news for the country.
• 2009: 8 year old korean boy hailed as new starcraft champion and prodigy. koreans elect him as president. south korea renamed to "terran confederacy" (or something like it).
• 2013: starcraft prodigy-king-president dies from game-addiction. koreans mourn, institute new holiday in his name.

am i going anywhere with this? i have a 20 page paper to write on farm subsidies due in 2 days or something. i'm just going to draw 20 pictures of cows and pigs and turn that in.

Gerbil Competition

Yesterday, in Bedford, there was a gerbil show. Oscar Eliot is currently traveling across the country and was unfortunately unable to compete (even though I didn't even know about the opportunity until I read this article on BostonNow.com). Had he competed, he would've definitely won the Best White Belly category, considering the runner-up was a handicapped defect. He would've also placed in Cutest Face, Best Gnawer, and...Best Fed?

Only one top gerbil? Gnaw, they're all Best In Show.

"It's the equivalent to the Westminster Kennel Club in there!" Judith Block from New York City said about the American Gerbil Society's 6th annual New England Gerbil Show. More than 200 people and their 77 show-gerbils squeezed, scurried and gnawed their way through the crowded Lexington Room of the Bedford Best Western last Saturday.

Braving bad weather and even worse directions, the Blocks
made it to the hotel on Thursday. It was worth it - they picked up their brand
new 11-week-old Gerbil pups, Pete and Guthrie.

Block says her special gerbil was Phoebe. "She would chew cardboard into sculptures," she said. "She had an artistic soul."

Amateur gerbilists took part in Pet Class competitions. Best Gnawer, Most Adventurous and Cutest Face were only some of the categories open to these gerbil competitors.

Tracy Kukkonen's Mochi took first place in Most Adventurous.

"He climbs on everything," Kukkonen said.

By the end of the day, Renee and Tom Arena and their son Justin Salmons from Waltham were on edge. It was a nail-biter as Buffy defended her crown for Best White Belly, while Blackie competed for the first time in the Best Color category.

It was looking grim for Blackie. Judges discovered a minor eye injury.

"They're in there splitting whiskers," Arena said.

In the end, Blackie took second place in her category. The Blocks pup, Pete, took third in the Spotted category. Block wasn't upset that Guthrie didn't place.

"All my children are special," she said.

great escape (to california)

do you remember 3 posts ago when i was wondering about how to get my gerbil home to california with me? in addition to the 3 very plausible (i'm serious) ideas i had, i thought of another one.

• find a band who is touring the country on the road, playing a show in boston soon, and returning to california in a couple weeks.

so, yesterday morning i parted with oscar eliot and he is currently traveling across the county on the pretty girls make graves final tour with moonrats. today, he's in nyc and if he's like me, he should be having a blast. by the time we're reunited again, he will be the most well-traveled gerbil in the world. i'm so proud of him.

great excuse

its may. 40 degrees and t-storms should not be a daily occurrence at this point in the year. on thursday, i just had to do something about it. i went online and

• 2 dresses
• 2 tops
• 4 sunglasses
• earrings
• headbands
• necklace
• ring
• belt

the sunglasses were non-designer, so don't freak out.

red cross hates midgets and pregnant women

in high school, red cross held blood drives in the gym at least once a semester. if i remember correctly, donating blood could clear up to 10 detentions! but unlike me, if you actually showed up early to school and went to those retarded advisement classes (aka homeroom in other places) and didn't have detentions to clear from your useless perfect attendance, you could also get tons of extra credit for most classes. even better, if you donated blood, they always gave you juice boxes and cookies, a tshirt and a sticker that read, "i donated blood today!" that falsely showed the entire world how much you cared about saving lives. this is what made me really annoyed:

• minimum age requirement was 17. i turned 17 senior year and this only gave me 1 year to even possibly take advantage of this marvelous opportunity. lame.
• minimum weight was something like 95-100 lbs. in high school, i always hovered around the high-80s (dairy-free, pescatarian diets really did something). i was planning on gaining weight in college anyway, so i thought i could finally get my juice box and humanitarian sticker then. i was over the detentions and extra credit, and their shirts were always too big for me anyway.
• sounds crazy, but i think drawing blood into a tube is totally fun. although getting shots are a different story.

then, in college, red cross raised the minumum weight to 110 lbs.! i'm a steady low 90 and the only time i would ever hit 110 is when im pregnant. and apparently, red cross doesn't think its a good idea to donate blood when there's another person growing inside of you. so, it looks like i'm never going to be able to swagger around with one of those stickers. bummer.

smuggling gerbil

i need to figure out a way how to smuggle my pet gerbil on my flight to california. the hardest part is getting it through security. and in case you didn't know, all animals are prohibited on planes except dogs and cats.

if you say anything about richard gere or anus, i will smash you.

here are my ideas so far:

• wear a big coat/jacket with an oversized inside pocket and without a shirt underneath. that way, when they say "take off your coat, miss," i can say, "i'm naked under, do i need to prove it to you?"
• put him in a small custom made drawstring pouch and tie the laces around my leg. and wear a poofy 19th century petticoat.
• feed him nyquil (without killing him) and put him in the pocket of my hoodie.

i lost this one.

Adrian Gaty wrote a new note. 10:10pm
seoul or beijing? where should i move? thoughts?

Irene Choi wrote at 10:37pm
uhh...antarctica. trust me, penguins are much more amiable than asians.

Adrian Gaty wrote at 11:05pm
irene, i found your comment to be extremely offensive. how can you disparage an entire race like that? in the future, please use the correct terminology: orientals is preferable, though chinamen is also acceptable.